To meet increasing demands of communications in wireless networks, for instance due to increase use of smartphones, tablets, and video streaming, advanced network architectures including heterogeneous radio access networks (RANs) are being developed. The heterogeneous RANs include various types of access points including macro-level access points such as base stations (BSs) as well as smaller coverage access points such as so-called small cells. In many architectures, inside the coverage area of macro-level access points are the nested smaller cells (e.g., Femto and Pico cells). This provides a wide network coverage area with an increased communication capacity to serve users where needed. One challenging issue to be addressed in heterogeneous networks is mitigating signal interference between access points within coverage areas. In the terminology of Long Term Evolution based networks, Access to as base stations that provide cellular coverage. Within cells, the signal interference caused by other access points is referred to as inter-cell interference. A cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a RAN architecture that offloads at least some encoding/decoding functionalities of BSs to a cloud-computing based central processor (CP). The C-RAN architecture allows coordination and joint signal processing across multiple cells through corresponding links between the BSs and the CP, also referred to as fronthaul links. However, there is a need for efficient schemes that can take advantage of the C-RAN architecture to improve overall communications performance and mitigate the inter-cell interference between the cells.